The End of ( Traditional ) Emergence : Introducing Reactive Emergence
• When we finally understand what emergence truly is [ we will know ] whether there are any genuine examples of emergence .
• How should emergence be defined ? ... Irreducibility , unpredictability , conceptual novelty , ontological novelty , supervenience ?
• In what ways are emergent phenomena autonomous from their emergent bases , irreducible to their bases , inexplicable from them , unpredictable from them , supervenient on them , multiply realizable in them ?
• Does emergence necessarily involve novel causal powers , especially powers that produce “ downward causation ?”
• Emergence ... is simultaneously palpable and confusing .
• The very idea of emergence seems opaque , and perhaps even incoherent .
Philosophical uncertainly about emergence can be tracked by how philosophers have thought about Gresham ’ s law 5 over the past four decades . Fodor ( 1974 ) pointed to Gresham ’ s law to illustrate the autonomy of the special sciences . A third of a century later , Loewer ( 2008 ) and then Papineau ( 2009 ) argued that Gresham ’ s law is not emergent . Half a decade after that , Pigliucci ( 2013 ) claimed that Gresham ’ s law is prima facie evidence for ontological emergence . Two years later , O ’ Connor and Wong ( 2015 ) 6 said that Gresham ’ s law is a form of epistemological emergence . In short , philosophers have long been — and remain — divided about emergence .
2 . Demystifying Emergence 2.1 Nonreductive Physicalism
Loewer ( 2009 ) established a solid foundation for discussions of emergence .
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According to Non-Reductive Physicalism Light ( NRPL ), the special sciences contain vocabulary / concepts that are conceptually independent of the concepts / vocabulary of physics ... A biologist may have evidence that a biological
5 Gresham ’ s law asserts that if two mintings of a coin have the same face value but different intrinsic values ( because of the metals of which they are made differ ) those with the greater intrinsic value will be hoarded while those with the lesser intrinsic value will circulate . In slogan form : bad money drives out good .
6 O ’ Connor and Wong ’ s “ Emergent Properties ” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy might be considered the definitive survey of emergence . O ’ Connor and Wong define emergence as follows . “ Emergent entities ( properties or substances ) ‘ arise ’ out of more fundamental entities and yet are ‘ novel ’ or ‘ irreducible ’ with respect to them .” They note that “ each of the quoted terms is slippery in its own right ” and that different ways of understanding them “ yield varied notions of emergence .”
7 Like Fodor , Loewer did not use the term emergence , but his point is the same .
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